Virj Kan is an engineer, designer, and entrepreneur. Her work centers on building experiences that reshape human relationships with the environment and each other by elucidating the abstract information landscapes we exist in. She is the founder of Primitives Biodesign, a biotech startup that produces intelligent, biodegradable packaging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from plastics production and food waste. Utilizing biopolymers from nature, Primitives flexible films sense and respond to the environment – enabling food packaging to monitor quality, improve safety and return to the earth by breaking down into compost. Prior to founding Primitives, Virj designed IoT and mobile computing products at the Samsung Design Innovation Center and engineered 3D human-robot interfaces at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Did you know?
Gilberto Loureiro grew up inspecting fabrics in a Portuguese textile factory. With Smartex, he and co-founders Antonio Rocha and Paulo Ribeiro are eliminating textile defects—and their enormous cost both to manufacturers and the environment.
Miranda Wang and Jeanny Yao have an uncanny talent for finding value where others see waste. Their plastics upcycling company, Novoloop, just raised an $21m Series A to prove it.
To find the future of food, you may have to look no further than Emeryville, CA, a small city by the San Francisco Bay, where Upside Foods has built a 53,000-square-foot production facility for cultivated meat, the first of its kind.
In a timeless dilemma for new parents, Radhika and her husband Bharath discovered early that their baby daughter was a fussy sleeper. The situation left them tired and frustrated; being effective at work became a challenge.
The question for Sumit Sinha and Mukesh Bansal in February 2019 was which would come first: The funding for their seed round or the sale of their Hyundai hatchbacks.
In December 2021 Prellis raised a $14.5 million Series B and has signed partnerships with pharmaceutical behemoths including Bristol Myers Squibb and Sanofi.
It was 2016, and Chiu Chau was on the ropes. He had pitched nearly 150 venture capital firms. No one would invest. Everyone doubted the startup with the open-source laboratory robot.
Tesh Mbaabu rarely showed up to his freshman computer science class at the University of Nairobi. His classmate Mesongo Sibuti noticed.
Adebayo (“Ade”) Alonge and Amy Kao, co-founders of RxAll had nvented a handheld scanner for detecting counterfeit prescription drugs—an illicit, multibillion-dollar industry that kills an estimated 1 million people annually globally and 100,000 in Africa.